Collected Stories, Vol. 12
Fifty-Word Stories (31-40) Presented Simply From Northeastern Pennsylvania
31.
The greater of two suns set below the horizon, just as the lesser in the binary rose. Jack peeked between the blinds at the neon twilight. This was the feeding hour, when the hungry ones crept out of their dens to hunt. Jack opened the door. His belly was growling.
32.
The clock ticked down until the year changed. “Well, I guess that’s it then,” said an elderly Sam Spade. “I’m in the public domain.” He poured a drink, and sat down at his desk, where he began to write. As he did, the real Maltese Falcon appeared out of thin air.
33.
“Damn!” Charlotte pounded her palms against the steering wheel and let her little car roll to an anticlimactic stop by the side of the road. Just half a mile from home, and a flat tire on the front-rear, meant that she would not escape him, again, this time.
34.
After the accident, Harold heard voices. Jealous, mocking, filled with malice, and ever present, even if barely audible except in the quiet of the night between midnight and dawn. Really, it was an ideal situation for him. For the first time, since he was a boy, his own voice was silent.
35.
He wrote about wolves, and a wolf howled in the yard beside the pool. He thought of Lovecraft, and a tentacle splashed fetid water against the window. His father dissuaded him from becoming a writer, and he was beginning to understand why. Young Stephen searched frantically for a fresh eraser.
36.
Joshua thought about it for a moment, and then he pulled the lever. A fresh infusion of exotic particles flooded the chamber. He looked on from outside, as his subject writhed and convulsed, becoming again, if only for a moment, something approximating, but not altogether actually, truly, human.
37.
Sixteen bloodless bodies, circular puncture wounds to their necks. Detective Hadley had never seen anything like it in the warehouse district. This kind of vampiric debauchery was said to be common uptown. But down here, the denizens were mostly your average, salt of the earth, werewolves, just like Hadley.
38.
He took off his leather jacket and hung it in the closet. He locked his pistol in a metal box. He folded a map and placed it with a stack of others in a file box, which he put on the top shelf. The adventure was over. He would not need them again.
39.
His assistant blew a hole in the universe and Ralph stepped through it. On the other side, he found a world identical to his own, but slightly worse, and almost completely depopulated. On second though, it was a far better world than his, and Ralph had no intention of leaving it.
40.
First came the rains. Uncharacteristically warm, relentless. The rains nurtured the fungi. The fungi released the spores, and we breathed them in greedily on our morning runs, or while we fucked. It was only months later that we began to notice it, the slow, minor changes in how each of us tasted.
-Brian